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One summer, a young woman travels with her lover to the isolated tobacco farm he has inherited after his family dies in a terrible accident. As Orren works to save his family farm from drought, Aloma struggles with the loneliness of farm life and must find her way in a combative, erotically-charged relationship with a grieving, taciturn man. A budding friendship with a handsome and dynamic young preacher further complicates her growing sense of dissatisfaction. As she considers whether to stay with Orren or to leave, she grapples with the finality of loss and death, and the eternal question of whether it is better to fight for freedom or submit to love.
All the Living has the timeless quality of a parable, but is also a perfect evocation of a time and place, a portrait of both age-old conflicts and modern life. It is an ode to the starve-acre Southern farm, the mountain landscape, and difficult love. In her lyrical and moving debut novel, C.E. Morgan recalls both the serenity of Marilynne Robinson and the shifting emotional currents and unashamed eroticism of James Salter. It is an unforgettable book from a major new voice.
"Morgan's prose holds the rhythm of the local dialect beautifully, evoking the land, the farming lifestyle and Aloma's awakening with stirring clarity." - Publishers Weekly.
"The strong tradition of Kentucky literature has found a great new addition in Morgan. A gorgeous debut; recommended for both popular and scholarly fiction collections." - Library Journal.
"Morgan occasionally musters a fine and telling phrase ... but these moments are overwhelmed by the story's grueling pace. Wearying." - Kirkus Reviews.
This information about All the Living was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
C.E. Morgan is an American author born in 1976. She studied English and voice at Berea College and holds a master's in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. The author of the novel All the Living, she is a recipient of the National Book Foundations 5 under 35 award and a 2010 Lannan Literary Fellowship.
In June 2010 she was named one of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of fiction writers worth watching. Ms. Morgan won a United States Artists Fellow award in 2012 and a Whiting Writers' Award in 2013.
She lives in Kentucky.
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